Lithium-ion batteries · Plastics · Venezuela
Carbon Age Energy is developing a mechanical recycling platform, planned for Venezuela, designed to turn defined lithium-ion battery and plastic streams into usable material fractions: black mass, copper, aluminum and clean plastic flakes.
Design stage · Not yet operating
Our mission
To build safe, traceable mechanical recycling in Venezuela that turns defined lithium-ion battery and plastic streams into specified materials for responsible reuse in industry.
Our vision
A Venezuela where end-of-life batteries and plastics are treated as recoverable resources, not waste: collected responsibly, processed safely and returned to industrial supply chains.
Why CAE was formed
Carbon Age Energy was formed to help close a gap: valuable materials in discarded batteries and plastics are being lost, and handling them carelessly creates real risks.
In Venezuela, much discarded material still ends up in open dumps or in informal, low-value collection. Formal industrial capacity to wash plastics to a high standard, or to process lithium-ion batteries safely, remains limited.
Lithium-ion batteries that are crushed in trucks or landfills can short-circuit and catch fire, and their electrolyte and metals can contaminate soil and water.
Spent batteries contain lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, copper, aluminum and graphite. Bottles and rigid containers contain recyclable PET and HDPE. When these end up in dumps, those resources are lost.
A planned industrial facility, designed with two independent mechanical lines: one for lithium-ion battery material and one for plastics. Each line is designed to deliver defined, traceable fractions that specialist industries can qualify and reuse.
Potential customers
These are target customer segments for planned products. They are not existing customers or agreements. Every future relationship starts with product specifications and quality evidence.
Specialist refiners, for example in Europe and Asia, that process black mass to recover lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese compounds for new batteries.
Product: black mass
Metal recyclers and processors that can qualify the copper-rich and aluminum-rich fractions separated from battery material.
Products: Cu and Al fractions
Manufacturers in Venezuela and, potentially, the wider Latin American region that use clean, dry PET and HDPE flakes as raw material.
Product: clean dry flakes
Feedstock sources
Target categories of input material. No supply agreements are in place. Each future stream must be defined by its source, condition, documentation and qualification before it is accepted.
The base design is intended for qualified manufacturing scrap. Whether broader end-of-life batteries can be accepted in the future, and whether an optional pretreatment module would be needed, will depend on engineering confirmation of chemistry, condition and state of charge.
Plastics and battery material are received, stored and processed separately, with different controls for each.
From end of life to black mass
CAE's working design is a mechanical process only: it separates battery material physically and does not include chemical (hydrometallurgical) refining. The steps below describe the design intent; equipment suppliers have not been selected.
Batteries reach the end of their useful life, or become scrap during manufacturing. They are collected through qualified, documented channels.
Each lot is inspected for chemistry, condition and state of charge. Damaged or non-conforming units are kept apart in quarantine.
Where the accepted feed requires it, remaining stored energy is reduced before size reduction, following defined handling procedures.
Material is shredded inside enclosed equipment designed with temperature monitoring, thermal-event detection, dust containment and emergency stops.
Screening and physical separation methods, such as air classification and magnetic or eddy-current separation, divide the shredded material into fractions.
Planned outputs are black mass, a copper-rich fraction, an aluminum-rich fraction and a light plastic fraction, collected in sealed bulk bags or drums with lot traceability.
Black mass is the fine, dark powder recovered when battery cells are shredded and separated. It contains the active electrode materials: cathode metals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese (depending on battery chemistry) and anode graphite. It is an intermediate material, not a finished battery product.
Specialist refiners process black mass, typically with hydrometallurgical methods, to recover lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese compounds. These compounds can be used to make cathode materials for new batteries, closing the loop.
Second line
The plastics line is designed to process PET bottles and HDPE rigid containers into clean, dry flakes for industrial buyers. Pelletizing is not part of the initial design.
The design calls for water recirculation to keep makeup-water use low.
Project status
Contact
For questions about the project, potential material streams or technical topics, please contact:
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